Promoting Weblists

We're very close to launching a new feature that's going to help a lot in the promotion and discovery of Weblists.

The feature is called Weblist Tagging, and here's how it works:

We've added a new field in the Weblister tool that allows RIA members to tag their weblist with one word "keywords."

For example, on the Mexican Beer list, I might choose to assign the following keyword tags:

cerveza
beer
mexico
tecate
corona
taco

Once I submit these tags, they will help other people find my Weblist whenever they are searching for any of the keywords that you used as tags. So if a new visitor to RateItAll does a search for Mexico, among the search results they see will be Magellan's Mexican Beer weblist.

But wait, there's more. By aggregating all of these tags, RIA can actually provide an alternative search service, specifically for Weblists.

Here's how it works: RateItAll creates a single page on the site called "Browse Weblists." On this page will appear the top 100 or so Weblist tags that people use to describe their Weblists. This is what's called a "Tag Cloud", and the tags that appear most frequently will show up as bigger words. To see an example of a tag cloud, check out this page on Delicious.

Now, imagine a tag cloud like that, made up of keyword tags that people have assigned to their Weblists. Clicking on the Weblist tag, "Mexico" will display ALL of the Weblists that people have tagged with the word "Mexico." I think this is going to be a really neat way to discover Weblists about the things you are interested in.

One final point about how we can use these Weblist tags to make it easier to find stuff on RIA. Because of these tags, it is now a very easy thing for RIA to draw correlations between Weblists. For example, someone on the Mexican Beer weblist might see a box called "Related Weblists" that shows the top five rated Weblists that share the same keyword tags. Again, it's an alternative way to discover and promote new Weblists.

I find it amazingly cool how many neat things can be done simply by allowing people to assign keyword tags to their Weblists.